A system determines if someone watching a live video feed looks or moves away from a display screen, and when their attention is back on the display, provides an accelerated recap of the content that they missed. The video component of the feed may be shown as a series of selected still images or clips from the original feed, while audio and/or text captioning is output at an accelerated rate. The rate may be adaptively adjusted to maintain a consistent speed, and superfluous content may be omitted. When the recap catches up to the live feed, output returns to regular speed.